


Metamorphosis

by sadlittletiger



Category: Biohazard | Resident Evil (Gameverse)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-RE6
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-08-22
Updated: 2016-08-22
Packaged: 2018-08-10 07:38:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7835941
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sadlittletiger/pseuds/sadlittletiger
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a new world, a reviled villain and a left-for-dead lieutenant are thrust into unfamiliar roles.  Their lives hang in the balance as they navigate strange waters together and The War To End All Wars rages on around them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metamorphosis

**Author's Note:**

> This is a piece I really enjoy and work on in little bits - a true guilty pleasure. The idea has been in my head for years and is finally taking some kind of form. I hope you like it. Let me know what you think and thanks for reading!

_“Prisoner One, get up.”_

Wesker turned over on the cot. The fluorescent lights flooded the room. His eyes had little time to adjust. He blinked, pupils contracting. A soldier in riot gear appeared in the doorway. He held a stun rod, but shook pitifully.

Wesker stared at him, rubbing the collar he wore. A tiny LED set in the middle blinked bright blue.

_“Prisoner One, get up. That is an order.”_

Wesker looked up at the disembodied voice - a telecom system in the corner of his cell.

Obliging, he sighed and stood. His hands went lazily to lock behind his head, elbows out. The soldier edged forward. His left hand reached out, shaking. He patted down Wesker’s flanks, up his thighs hurriedly. Wesker watched.

“If I wanted to end your life… I wouldn’t require a weapon.”

The soldier dared a glance at Wesker’s face then. The stun rod buzzed to life in his hand. Wesker smiled at the threat.

_“Prisoner One, you are needed in the med bay. Stat.”_

He raised a pale eyebrow. “Another time then, private.”

* * *

 The scientists were huddled around a bed when Wesker arrived in escort. He waited to be acknowledged in the doorway. The first one to see him was his least favorite - a bright young man, in his mid-twenties. Wesker had unaffectionately called him _Birkin_ on a few occasions.

“Doctor, sorry to wake you,” he said, a plastic smile on his impish face. He pushed his safety goggles up onto his forehead to better see.

Wesker stared at him, unmoved.

Another scientist, a pretty, red-headed Australian girl with a generous figure, named Joanie Spitzer, glanced at him, and then away. Wesker nodded to her and watched with amusement as her face glowed a lovely shade of pink. She kept her gaze averted. He came across the medical bay to stand beside _her_. His body was acutely aware of hers - signals fired left and right, up and down. He could smell her fertility, he could hear her pulse, the blood rushing through her excitedly. She struggled between shrinking away and daring to stay close. It pleased him.

Wesker wrested his attention back to the body in the bed. A naked boy, perhaps alive, perhaps dead - his face bloated with infection, great patches of it consumed by the scaly calling card of the C-Virus.

Wesker’s eyes fell immediately on what had been the right arm. Sporadic waves of brilliant blue electricity still coursed over the hunk of mutated meat and metal. It was spectacular.

“Well…,” Wesker said. He _tsked_ , shaking his head.

“It’s nothing like what we’ve seen,” the lead scientist said. “Sergeant Phillips pulled him aboard just after two. A few clicks off the coast of Lanshiang.”

The room was silent and tense. The scientists watched Wesker.

“We thought maybe you’d like a look before we euthanize him,” one them said.

Wesker sighed and moved around the hospital bed, his hands clasped behind his back. “Pen?” he asked Joanie. Nervously, she handed it over. He used it turn the boy’s face toward the spotlight. “Ocular mutation in the right eye… Some variation of… corneal dystrophy, it would seem.” Wesker frowned. “Typical desquamation of the upper epidermis… The same gangrenous tissue…” He paused when he came to the boy’s arm. “Now, that’s interesting, isn’t it?”

“Very. There’s not much salvaging we can do,” the lead scientist said. “We’ll put him down tonight and dissect tomorrow. That appendage is just fascinating though. How phenomenal.”

“Mmm,” Wesker agreed. “You’ll make note here —“ he pointed with the pen, circling in the air just above the chest. “That it’s eaten through the flesh, exposing a fair amount of ribs and organs… perhaps the musculature has been rerouted to the arm. Unintended side effect, certainly, but of interest as we see this virus evolve in real time.” The scientists listened and scratched his words down frantically on paper. He squinted, staring into the boy’s great blank white eye again. “A very thin elliptical pupil… perhaps functional.” He waved the pen just above the boy’s face. The pupil did not respond. They all watched Wesker, waiting with bated breath for his next observation. “It’s quite beautiful,” he said.

He straightened up and held the blue pen back out to Joanie, who stared at him, her clipboard held tightly to her ample chest.

“One more remark: he’s not of Asian descent,” Wesker pointed out.

“No, no he’s not. His name is…” The obnoxious young scientist picked up an article of shredded clothing from the bloody pile. “Lieutenant Piers Nivans. B.S.A.A. North America.”

Wesker coughed, catching himself before he burst out laughing. He forced his face to return to it’s naturally unpleasant state. The odds of this very situation were unimaginable.

“Maybe should we… report him? To the B.S.A.A.?” Joanie asked, her voice sweet and breathy for Wesker. The scientists spoke over each other about the idea of notifying authorities. Wesker listened to them argue, lost in thought. The exchanges died down to silence.

Wesker looked up, his fingers thrummed his lips. Finally, “He would be an excellent candidate for genetic therapy, given the nature of his mutations. Of course, informing the B.S.A.A. would be counterproductive to the research… Should you decide to administer A.W.-23.”

“But A.W.-23 isn’t ready yet,” the young Will Birkin challenged.

Wesker glared at him, arms crossed.

The scientist shifted from foot to foot under such terrifying scrutiny.

Wesker’s angry face broke after several uncomfortable seconds. He smiled, wide and toothy, and held up his hands. “Does it really matter that it’s _not ready_?” He clapped then, just once, and laughed. “The boy’s dying. He _will_ die, whether you intervene or not.”

The scientists, suddenly relieved, all smiled back.

“I mean… I don’t see the harm in it,” the lead scientist said.

“No harm at all,” Wesker agreed. “In fact… the only harm would be in _not_ taking advantage of this opportunity.”

* * *

 

A.W.-23 was a cure wrought out of desperation. Project J.M. had failed miserably; while the boy had carried some useful genes, it was not enough to reverse the devastating effects of the C-virus. Hundreds of thousands, and then millions, succumbed to the disease - it spread outward from China like a blast zone, jumping from continent to continent in the hands of every organized crime ring under the sun. Some victims willingly inflicted it upon themselves, many were forcibly infected, and the casualties that sprang from attempting to control the afflicted were even worse.

A.W.-23’s mechanism was simple: gut the Prototype virus that coursed through Albert Wesker’s veins, reconfigure the virus to program T cells, and on those new orders, the T cells would eradicate the C-virus, which had thus far evaded all forms of therapy. This method of genetic modification had met with favorable results in certain cancers. The Prototype virus though, was difficult to study for a variety of reasons, and even more difficult to modify. Using it in any capacity was like fighting fire with fire.

Wesker watched, barely able to conceal his smile, as the scientists injected Lieutenant Piers Nivans with the milky antiviral. It was the second dose. In preliminary rodent studies, the C-virus didn’t begin remission until the fourth administration of A.W.-23. He could imagine what the inside of the boy looked like at that moment - a veritable battlefield, pathogen versus pathogen. Already, he’d gone into cardiac arrest once, his embattled body sent spinning into shock.

The surgeons on board - the best left in the burning world - had cut away much of the infected tissue, leaving little else. He was covered in wet gauze, more bone and muscle exposed after each surgery, with no skin to graft. But the A.W.-23 was accelerating the healing to superhuman speeds. The electric arm was gone, replaced with a state-of-the-art prosthetic only a billionaire could have afforded back before the war. The chances of it being viable after such a traumatic incident were low, but Lieutenant Nivans was more lab rat than human, and so no experimental procedure was spared during the end of times.

Wesker rubbed his nose and sighed; the ship was kept so cold. He absently pulled at the blinking collar and thought of Chris Redfield, as he always did when he looked at the half-dead boy. He thought of crushing Redfield’s rib cage in so that the two of them matched.

“Coffee… Doctor?” Joanie asked, just to his right. He glanced at her cleavage and then took the offering. The styrofoam was pleasantly hot. He enjoyed the sensation between his hands before taking a cautious sip. Two french vanilla creamers and one tablespoon of sugar. She’d finally gotten it right, the useless slut.

He considered, briefly, that he might not have to kill her when the time came.

Then again… He’d thought the same thing about Excella.

He took another sip and watched the swarm of doctors around Lieutenant Nivans.

_Useless sluts. The whole lot._

* * *

On Day 21, after eleven injections… Piers Nivans woke up.

* * *

A tear welled up in his eye and trailed to his hairline, pooling with the others in the seashell of his ear. He blinked hard against the pain, arching into the thin pillow. They had taken his arm; in its place, something alien and immobile. He could’t feel it, couldn’t move it. He could only feel pain. White hot pain… blinding, searing pain that came from everywhere and nowhere. He wanted badly to look at himself, to see what was left of him, what could be firing off his agony, but the cervical collar and the restraints kept him from moving anything at all. No one spoke to him, no nurse stopped to explain where he was or what they were doing. He thought sometimes that he _might_ be dead, and in hell; other times, he felt such deep and overwhelming terror, he knew beyond any doubt that he _was_ in hell.

His throat burned and so he took sparing shallow breaths. The intubator had been removed, he couldn’t have known when… perhaps a day ago, or many. Time had no meaning while he lay prone in the bed. One eye was taped closed - he couldn’t imagine why, but he felt the tugging of the adhesive on his cheek, on his brow. He tried very hard to open it. Over and over.

A nurse leant close to his right arm, her hands doing something, wrapping perhaps, but he could not feel it. He groaned and whispered.

“Please,” he said. But it didn’t sound like _please_ when it reached his ears. It didn’t sound like much of anything. Just a… _bleat_.

She didn’t look up from her work.

He screwed his eye shut again as another blast of pain shot from his head to his toes, like a great bolt of lightning. That was the only way he could think to describe it. No part of him was safe. He cried out, but it was only a whimper.

When he opened the eye again, he saw a blurry figure of a man. Imposing, with a patch of fuzzy almost-white hair. Piers blinked, and blinked again. Everything seemed dull except for the unabating torment in his body.

Piers moaned, legs writhing against the bed’s restraints. The tall man stood off to the side, impassive, unmoving. Piers could see the outline of the man’s face, looking up at the monitors and then back down. He squinted, but to no avail. Everything was smudged.

“Help,” he tried. “Help me, please… help me!” And the words sounded like grunts and keens. Piers began to hyperventilate. The machines around him roared to life - beeps and screeches and bells. It did nothing but exacerbate his panic.

The nurses gathered closer to the bed, staring down on him, talking just above his face, as if he weren’t there… as if he couldn’t hear them—

_“Tube him again.”_

_“He’ll never pull through this.”_

_“He’s gone - he’s as good as a vegetable…”_

“Perhaps,” came a clear voice through their chatter. Everyone stopped, everyone turned… even Piers found himself listening over his thundering heart to the deep, hard voice. “Perhaps you’d consider administering something for the pain… yes?” His suggestion was met with silence. “To calm the patient,” he explained further.

Piers saw the nurses leaning over him exchange glances, and the air was tense - in his half-dead state he could feel the tension. “No. That’s against orders. We’re not supposed to waste anything extra on him. We might need it later…” one of the nurses finally replied. She was hesitant… as if she didn’t want to say no.

The tall man sighed after a beat. “Prudent. Yes.”

The group collectively sighed too.

Piers blinked and heard the machines wind down, felt his own body wind down.

Alarms somewhere down in the bay went off and sent the nurses scuttling.

And then it was just him… and the tall man.

Piers squinted his working eye. Yes, he _was_ blond, broad-shouldered, in a white jacket like the others that hovered around him. He stood, stiff-backed and still. Even in his addled state, Piers could feel the power roll off the stranger; he lacked the sensitive tone of a doctor… but he wasn’t gruff like the military police Piers had heard patrolling the triage. He was an altogether different animal.

“You and I… we are star-crossed,” the man said quietly. Piers tried to jerk his head, to see the obscured face. It was of no use - he was immobilized.

The tall man drifted from his vision. Piers held his breath.

“Indeed. We are fated. And so… you _must_ recover.”

There was the sound of rummaging through drawers - metal pinging off of metal, glass tinkling against glass. Piers felt his heart race again, thumping wildly in his chest. And then the man returned to his bed side. He fussed with something just out of sight, somewhere above, and Piers saw it, only a flash of it in the cold, white light.

 _A syringe_.

“Help!” Piers called… but it was only a groan.

“Try to relax, Lieutenant Nivans,” the tall man said as he injected the contents of the syringe into the I.V. line. Piers tried to roll away, kick his feet, cry out - something, anything, to escape the stranger and whatever he was trying to poison him with. His body plainly refused to cooperate; he remained almost rigid and prostrate against his screaming, terrified will.

The white-haired man leaned down, very close to Piers’s face. “I’ve taken the liberty of giving you a dose of fentanyl. To ease your discomfort. Our little secret, hmm?”

Piers blinked, his breath coming out in quick bursts. He felt his muscles, tied in knots of agony, slowly unraveling, liquifying. He was suddenly light-headed and sleepy. And for the first time since he had reluctantly come back the world… he didn’t feel pain.

“No need to thank me… I’ve done some research on you, Lieutenant, and it would seem that we’re something like family, aren’t we?” The tall man straightened and stared down at Piers. “You, me, and Chris Redfield… One happy family…”

Piers fought to keep his eye open, wrestled with what it all meant, what the man was saying - none of it was making sense. _Chris Redfield? The Captain? How could he know… Chris Redfield…_

The fentanyl won, and Piers slipped under into a deep, healing sleep.


End file.
